When he died there was no way of transcribing them automatically (there still isn't really). The boxes stood in my mothers already cramped attic for 13 years, then she got cancer, and she felt a need to finish up things, so she got a scanner and started just scanning.
When my mother died she had scanned about a thousand pages, not transcribed, not anything.
The text in the diaries were fun at times, sometimes depressing, seeing how little he cared about my mother and his family was crushing.
My brother wanted to continue the scanning but I told him that I wanted to throw the diaries away. He kept half a year of writing around his birth (there's at least a sentence) and my uncle did the same, then we just watched it all burn (not literally, we threw it away at the recycling centre).
Not everything needs to be preserved. I'm happy some parts is preserved. I'm happy that those diaries are ash.
And I'm sorry your mom experienced that weight towards the end of her life. That sounds like a significant thing to grapple with, especially considering some of the not so pleasant content mentioned.
I feel like i don't know how to emotionally react to the AI part of this story. To begin with, it is fundamentally cool we have technology like that. At the same time it felt bittersweet, like an artisan being put out of business by the factory. The first part of the story felt like much of the love was in constructing everything by hand, it seems almost sad to lose that. There is also an element of dystopia in how the AI was able to cross reference everything, bank statements, ticketmaster recipts, shazam, etc. It is kind of unsettling the power of it all.
Not sure where i'm going with this comment. Its a super cool project, thanks for sharing.
Steve Jobs saw the computer as a bicycle for the mind, a way to enable us to do more and be more. This is the metaphor against which I measure all technology.
I think that in this case, it helped someone make something deeply human by abstracting the tedium away. It did what a computer should do: aid a human with their task.
Technology has been feeling like a devil's bargain for a while now. This was a rare glimpse of how I used to see tech, and of why I was so excited about it.
If you build this encyclopedia as a purely robotic collector of facts that nobody reads, it’s probably more dystopian horror.
If you build it as a fun inner loop that reconnects you with people and memories and makes you more human, then it’s great.
We should endeavor to craft experiences that do the latter; right now we are back in the hacker days when small teams can build big new ideas, and big tech hasn’t taken over.
It'd be better if we all turned this tech off and went to be with other people.
This is basically how social media was when you needed a computer to go online. You’d sit and sift through your feeds and there’d be message chains you respond to. You’re not really doing anything else while you’re doing that and you’re putting it out of mind once you step away. When Twitter first started getting big it was sort of a joke that people are talking to you while on the toilet. The idea that you were only ever half engaged with anything you’re doing was remarkable enough to be worth pointing out instead of taken for granted.
It’s just a lot more focused and intentional when you’re dedicating time and headspace to the task instead of “microdosing” on connection via a dopamine lottery. Even if you took away the ads and the interpolation of creator-content crowding out the connections with people you actually know, I think designing for an infinite scroll just inherently makes the thing less human-centered. It sets it up so you’re interacting with these atomized bits of ‘content’ rather than people.
There's a comment by bonoboTP in a sibling thread about the emotional complexity of a project like this. There are many ways to narrate a life story: many traumatic episodes and feuds better left forgotten, different framings, and all that emotional labor of trying to choose what and how you want to remember.
The use of LLMs for creating a shared view for some information isn't inherently morally dubious-processing and storing data is what computers have been doing for generations-except for the privacy implications, but letting this projection of a mega-corporation usurp the role of narrator for such a deeply personal story feels wrong on an instinctual level.
It is a nice idea, and I can imagine how it may serve to strengthen the family's social cohesion, in a time where everyone is busy doing the rat race. Though I'd not use it as "encyclopedia", a cold-hearted fact recorder, more like more a social-focused "Our Family Diaries" and would be much better served by family members writing down their own experiences.
Because without AI it probably wouldn’t exist.
I understand the bittersweet feeling because I did all the editorial work for the wedding page and the first few others and I did feel like a historian trying to connect the dots after stumbling into some primary/secondary materials and spending a couple months doing all the editorial work
after I began experimenting with agents, it sped up my process that otherwise would've taken many more months for every page given that the kinds of data sources also increased over time
I did still spend significant amounts of time like a wikipedia contributor would deciding on what to keep, enhance or delete from the page based on my own personal preferences and what I was comfortable with seeing on the page
the dystopic feeling is also fair and unsettling, I think this ironically also made me realize how important safeguarding my personal data is, we leave digital trails of ourselves everywhere so a powerful agent can string them together to create a story of who you are
That's the use-case I enjoy with AI. Let it do the heavy-lifting, I'll enjoy the rest.
AI here is not a tool, it's the author, or at the very least a co-author that greatly influences the human author. It selects what's important and then writes the narrative. It has its own biases. The narrative isn't based on what's personally important to the human creator, but rather the availability of data, those sources that are digitized. And then in turn the output shapes the human author's own perspective, changing even what the human will write on their own.
If instead, the OP had collected this information into a physical book, when they get bored or sick or dies, the book gets pushed into a closet or garage, waiting for some grandchild, nephew or niece to pull it out and rediscover the family history. And if anyone has even a slight interest in continuing the legacy, they don't have to know how to use a computer, just some basic scrapbooking skills, which we all learned in kindergarten.
What a lovely resource, especially if it reflects stories and recollections given by the subjects themselves.
The idea of having AI do it all is really off-putting IMO. For a number of reasons:
1) You lose the curation. You'll inevitably see a bias towards documenting based on the quality and availability of the sources as opposed to the significance of the event. E.g. you might not have much info about some really special childhood event you or someone else remembers, but does that mean it shouldn't be documented? Conversely, I don't want a 10,000 word essay on (to quote one of the titles from the post) "The 3D printing saga" -- just because I happen to have hundreds of WhatsApp messages on the subject.
2) I don't want to fact check every detail. Personally, I think if grandad (RIP) would have told me he one surfed a 20ft wave of the coast of Filey, Yorkshire. I don't need a correction that it was unlikely to be that high. If these things are partly being done "in memoriam" then I think it's really important to preserve the experiences, stories and recollections if the people we're trying to remember. Dates etc are fine to validate and correct. But there's an element of subjectivity to memories that is really special IMO. What even is reality at the end of the day? We're all just one big collective story we tell ourselves.
3) It feels soulless. Enough said on this one, I think people know what I mean
Similar with this, when you're hand curating old photographs and personally interviewing relatives, you're learning something. You're deepening relationships and your own personal understanding of these people you love, spending time reflecting on your own life. But when you send an LLM at it and it produces the volume of real Wikipedia, now an automated process is producing more text than you can ever possibly read if all you did for the rest of your life is read.
Throughout the year we keep writing in it, things we learnt, discords we had and how we resolved them, recipes I experimented with and we loved, random thoughts; basically anything and everything. And that little diary becomes an embodiment of that year.
I would also like to point out the manual labor and writing into it and not using an obsidian++-AI-auto-categorizer-3000 is simply because it feels like it's worth something, it's a nice little routine we have at the start of every year, and it's really fun reading these from 2-3 years back. Also the kids will have some really interesting reading a few years down the line.
I imagine a future where this becomes a family tradition that transcends time, knowledge from different generations, living different lives all nicely recorded in these codices. Something about this whole thing feels really beautiful to me.
I was thinking the other day I need to go back to a physical recipe book too. I don't cook that many different things that I need to reference it for, but there was a charm in my old one of remembering the best recipes were the ones covered in spilled ingredients and filled with marginalia.
Thanks for the resource!
The MediaWiki server died and I had backups, but... literally no one in the family would've tried to resurrect it.
They knew I'd worked on genealogy for a while but I don't think anyone would've thought to rebuild a linux box covered in dust and somehow find an old MediaWiki install on it.
I should've made simple markdown files with images in an image directory and printed out copies. That's a legacy. A consolidated, easy to drag from grandpa's house and throw on a shelf and flip through, even in 2097.
Ideally square books that can go on a coffee table. At least when I am dead there will be some part of my existence in physical form, unlike all the digital things we spend decades creating.
I might put a SD card taped in the front of each one with a video too, so someone can watch it in the future.
As a separate aside, I also found old Canon photo printers (Selphy models) on ebay for about £5! Some need the little white gear inside glueing back on (there's a video on YouTube about it), and they DO NOT work with Windows anymore, but gutenprint supports them fine on Linux, so I have been printing photos (postcard size) at home. The colour isn't going to win awards and the saturation needs boosting slightly in the printer options compared to default, but it's a wonderful way to finally get some photos from trips on the walls.
I’ve also done some light-fast testing. Laser prints (both B&W and color) survive a long while in direct harsh sunlight left in the window of my Utah home. All types of pen I tried were faded within a couple years but Pencil survives.
A 360 degree stapler is a fantastic tool for quickly binding them.
I do something similar but with email and more pro-active [1]. I have created my son an email address when he was born and I'm sending him things from our lives and ask family members to to the same. Just to write them about themselves and send photos of their current homes and gardens and partners.
I imagining him looking through his email when he's 18 and reading personalize messages sent by family members who might no longer be with us then.
[1] https://blog.haschek.at/2024/leaving-a-digital-legacy.html
As I store everything in a local Vikunja instance for notes and WIP, here's the list of links I assembled relative to this (hopefully useful; it includes calendar templates so that I can make them for my mother-in-law):
https://github.com/berteh/ScribusGenerator
https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Useful_Free_Resources
https://www.opendesktop.org/p/1106678
https://www.opendesktop.org/browse?cat=196&page=1&ord=latest
https://www.pling.com/s/Artwork/browse?cat=196&ord=latest
https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/CalendarWizard
https://github.com/RaffertyR/Year-Calendar-Script-for-Scribu...
https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Category:Scripts
https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Making_a_photobook_from_a_di...
https://wiki.rjcalow.co.uk/photography/make/designaphotobook...
https://github.com/PPSchL/scribus-photobook-scripts
https://github.com/RaffertyR/PhotoBookTools-for-Scribus
https://forums.scribus.net/index.php?topic=4081.0
https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Automatic_import_of_images_f...
https://wiki.scribus.net/canvas/Photo_Albums
https://github.com/hawbox/scribus-book-templates
https://forums.scribus.net/index.php?topic=3735.0
http://johnosterhout.com/basic-book-template-for-scribus/
When you find a print shop, they'll talk about margins and bleeds, so it might be worth finding a print shop first to know what bleed zones you want on the pages and whether they expect left page first, or right page first.
Once you know that, you can set up Scribus appropriately.
We have started asking old family members to send us whatsapp audios with tales and things they remember from long-passed away family members; and what was life like in the 1930-40-50s. I want to start organizing all the info and data we have, my father has built a couple family trees, but this wiki format is indeed very promising. I'll keep an eye on this and see if we can use it.
My partner's ancestors came from Sitges (in fact, one of them was the mayor of the town), back in 1820s or 1830s - to Argentina, and from there to Montevideo, Uruguay. Among the various marriages in the generations, there's a Scottish clan, and English ancestry intermixed with Spaniards. She can trace her roots back to some of the founding members and prominent political families there.
The last time we were in Scotland, we found the clan she's from - but couldn't ascertain the ship they took to Argentina :-/ That's left as an exercise for some future trips.
I wouldn't give a LLM run by a US corporation access to my private photographs.
From my perspective, the American President has threatened to annex my country, American businesses have repeatedly violated my trust, spyed on me and leaked my data, and American big tech is meddling in my country's politics. No other country has demonstrated such an ability and willingness to collect information about me and use it against me.
Given the US' NSA's long-standing violation of human rights at massive scale, and the proclivity of American society to be reasonable about kidnapping people, deemed unsavory, off the streets by jackboot thugs - and the fact that China builds roads, hospitals, ports, and communities around the world in nations considered 'inferior' by America's military junta/oligarch ruling class, while America bombs them into oblivion - I'm fine with the idea of eschewing American AI.
Its kind of necessary, I think, to resist this at the moment - at scale too, I might add.
If Americans want to fix this they still can - time is running out, however.
What I don't want to do is give it to services with an agenda to abuse the data, particularly those profiling individuals for profit. Frankly, I'd trust a Chinese service more than I would an Adtech based one, but that's still not much.
https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342...
Dodgy companies are a bigger danger to my (and your) privacy and wellbeing than the American NSA will ever be.
Unlike some of the comments herein, I find this as a perfect use of technology in service of users. (Yes, with some limits). I liken this to Maggie Appleton's Home-cooked Software model [1], wherein barefoot developers use technology (AI-driven or not) for writing apps for their own purposes, nominally for a user base of 1 (or very few), with possibilities of expanding to a few dozen.
In that vein, I'm a barefoot developer, and much of the software I have written in the past few months (with help from Claude, ChatGPT) is very much for that tiny user base of a few dozen (=mostly me, if I'm honest). And that is perfectly fine by moi.
I wrote a utility to organize roughly 100K+ photographs (and videos) neatly into dates/location, both for backup, as well as to maintain the memories in an organized fashion. Asked Claude to lookup location by EXIF; haven't yet asked it to "guess the location by photo" when no GPS info existed in the EXIFs. But I think I might do that.
(no, I haven't asked Claude to go thru my Uber trips or bank statements! I draw a line there!)
That is why the OP's personal wiki made me so excited - because the whole output resonates with me.
Like a few commenters mentioned their journaling experiences. I've started doing that with some of our trips (mostly post pandemic), both to remember our experiences better, and to come back to them as needed. The simple act of writing down places visited, experiences had (mostly hikes, mountains climbed, meals consumed in distant foreign places, weird/quirky experiences) causes them to be fresh in one's memories.
Thanks, this was a great project, and a great reminder as well.
Is anyone else feeling uncomfortable with that? It is a great project and I don't want to bash it with general concerns, but sharing all my financial and location details with any service seems like opening the floodgates to my house.
My concern is not even strictly related to AI, but about sharing all my most private data with any service. There is always a significant chance all of it is leaked sooner or later.
As an adversarial/worst-case model, it can be useful to think of every service as potentially storing forever all the data that you ever give it access to. As a practical matter, services have terms of service that they follow. If your Claude Code terms say that your data will not be used for training, you can be reasonably confident that they will not be, and storing the raw inputs forever (as suggested by “significant chance all of it is leaked sooner or later”) would be even more unlikely. (For example, Google has entire teams dedicated to compliance with users' “wipeout” settings. You can take a look at https://myactivity.google.com and https://myadcenter.google.com to see some of what Google knows and thinks about you, and if you've chosen "Auto-Delete after 3 months" or whatever, you can be very sure it will be gone after that time. Every single team that stores user data is required to comply with this.)
I do think the services make it harder than it should be, to find out what the terms are — for a given usage of their services whether and for how long the details will be stored by them. Just saying that you can find this out and generally rely on it at least at the time (at a reasonable threat model, e.g. not treating the service as a malicious adversary having a giant law-breaking conspiracy that has never been exposed).
